BOOK REVIEW – D H LAWRENCE – THE BORDER LINE 1928

One of Lawrence’s greatest short works, a sad and creepy ghost story, and a superb statement on the horrors of modern warfare.

Katherine Farquar is a German woman who lives in England in the 1910’s. She finds herself torn between two men, Alan Anstruther, a Scottish soldier, who she marries. She has two children to him, though they play little part in the terrible events to follow.

When Alan goes to war in the First World War trenches, fighting her own countrymen, he is soon declared missing presumed dead.  Katherine remarries his best friend, Philip, a mild mannered man and no warrior. Katherine comes to despise him.

After the war, Katherine and Philip are invited to go to Baden-Baden, in Germany, her hometown, to visit her sister. The couple travel separately, and on route by train, Katherine goes through the battlefields of France and Germany, especially around the border between the countries. She wonders how much human flesh is mixed in with the soil and if her first husband’s body is out there somewhere too.

Resting overnight near Strasbourg Cathedral, Katherine sees and is seen by the ghost of her beloved Alan. She knows he is dead, but considers him more alive than ever in her heart.

Later, in Baden-Baden, united with Philip and her sister, Marianne, who feels as if the war has robbed life of all humanity and love.

Philip and Katherine go to the spa baths to drink of the healing waters, but Philip suffers a coughing fit and bleeds heavily. Katherine struggles to lead him to his rooms, and finds the ghost of Alan helping her.  Philip is too delirious in pain to notice this. Later, Philip tells her that he has had nightmares in which Alan is trying to kill him and in which he is trapped in Alan’s coffin and corpse, unable to move. After a further health attack (akin to tuberculosis) Philip is visited by a doctor who tells him he has only suffered a minor ruptured broken blood vessel, but another attack kills Philip, and unlike Alan, he just dies. Katherine feels more alive and liberated than ever and some tramps see her making love to a man in the woods by the castle – her ghost-lover is now her everything.

There are many borders in this story, England-Scotland, war-peace, love-hate, life and death, etc. Katherine is in the No Man’s land borderline separating each. Lawrence captures history, and landscape with sheer perfection here. Only he mysterious tramps, themselves ghosts of a bi-gone age, seem to be largely unexplained here.

Arthur Chappell.